Sunday, 31 May 2015

It wasn't so long ago I wrote a post about integrating EPM 11.1.2.3 workspace with OBIEE 11.1.1.7, now with the recent release of OBIEE 11.1.1.9 I have to keep up the tradition and test out if the integration is still working, if I don’t then I will just get asked the question so I thought I would get there before it gets asked.

Once again I am not going to go into too much detail because I have covered it all before and you can read about it in the following blogs:

For the integration I am going using a clean install of OBIEE 11.1.1.9 with a EPM 11.1.2.4 environment and using Oracle as the database repository.

The Oracle OBIEE documentation covering the integration has not changed from 11.1.1.7 so I am assume the process much be the same and here is a high level walk through of the steps, if you want further information check out my previous blogs.

I didn't think I would get stuck at the first step as I have never head issues before but I got stalled at hooking up OBIEE to the AD, it wasn't a problem with the configuration as both EPM and OBIEE were configured exactly the same as in previous versions.

There were no problems returning the users in Shared services or logging in with an AD user.

Both the WebLogic Admin console and Enterprise Manager were returning the AD users and I could log into both using an AD user.

The problem was logging into OBIEE with an AD user, it would just fail and in the logs complain about the user not being found in the identity store.

After wasting too much time I noticed the following in the issues list in the documentation which I wasn’t expecting:

1.4.38 Authentication Fails Against Third Party LDAP When Virtualize is Set to TrueImpacted Releases: 11.1.1.9Platforms: AllWhen using Microsoft Active Directory as the Identity Store and also using the virtualize=true option, users are unable to login to Oracle Business Intelligence. This relates to Bug 20188679 - authentication fails against 3rd party ldap when virtualize=true set. Customers should check the availability of a patch for this issue on their installation platform before continuing to upgrade to 11.1.1.9.0.

This was exactly my issue and I would say it is quite a serious bug because it is so widely used.

At the time I first tested this out there was no patch available so I used a workaround but now the patch is available.

Fortunately applying the patch resolved the issue so on with the next steps.

The properties file requires updating with information to the EPM instance, run the utility to register.

Run EPM configure web server to add in OBIEE proxy information.

Proxy information added to the OHS configuration file.

At this point the OBIEE menus should be available in workspace and provisioning available in Shared Services, please note that the provisioning is only to provide access to users to the OBIEE menus in workspace and is totally separate to OBIEE provisioning.